THE SOUTH SEA BUBBLE OF 1720

These plates, produced in China for the Dutch market, embody the culture of satire surrounding the South Sea Bubble of 1720, a mania for investment and financial speculation whose burst induced the world’s first international stock market crash, felt keenly in the Netherlands. The bubble’s origin traces to 1711, with the founding of England’s South Sea Company by John Blunt and Robert Harley, who entered their firm into a unique relationship with the British government: the company assumed a portion of government debt, the government acquired a portion of shares and Parliament granted it a monopoly on trade with the Spanish Colonies in South America. As the 1710s progressed, it attained, under England and Spain’s Treaty of Utrecht, the asiento, or contract, from the Spanish government to conduct trade in enslaved Africans within the Spanish Empire, and began a fierce campaign to promote the sale of its shares. Investors from all walks of life were targeted by aggressive 'stock-jobbers', intermediaries between the general public and the brokers operating within the Royal Exchanges, who promised windfall returns and flaunted the firm’s slate of illustrious investors, including King George I himself.

By 1720, a large number of people from all levels of society in England, the Netherlands and France, lured in by the promise of vast profits on trade in South America, had invested significant stakes in the company, many having been encouraged to borrow heavily to buy shares. Share prices began to inflate as demand increased in the first half of the year, reaching a peak of £1050 at the end of June. As investments in the South Sea Company boomed, a ripple effect of speculative fervor took hold of the public, as many more rushed to buy stock in all manner of firms, including outright scams in which stock-jobbers sold 'shares' in hundreds of non-existent companies professing to earn profits in fields as unreal as square-barreled firearms, specialized caretaking for bastard children and even 'the fat’ning of hoggs.' Although some early investors managed to exit with a profit (the South Sea Company, adopting a tactic similar to a modern Ponzi scheme, paid them out them using capital raised from selling stock from other investors), large numbers were made bankrupt when the company's overinflated value abruptly crashed over the summer, its share price sinking to £190 by September and eventually to £124 in December. The crash coincided with a similar financial catastrophe in France, the collapse of John Law’s Mississippi company, which also centered on the promise of great profit in the New World and underwent a similarly swift and catastrophic end.

The crashes of 1720 prompted enormous public outrage and inspired satire in every popular medium, including prints, plays and broadside ballads from writers such as Jonathan Swift, who himself had once championed the South Sea Company. In a memorable 1721 engraving by William Hogarth, a colossal plinth in an urban square is inscribed 'This Monument was Erected in Memory of the Destruction of this City by the South Sea in 1720', while in front of it, allegorical figures of Honor and Honesty are flogged by figures of Self-Interest and Villainy, a puppet-show depicts a devil dismembering Fortune with a scythe, three clerical figures gamble over a small pile of coins, a queue of ladies gathers outside a raffle for 'Husbands with Lottery Fortunes' and a crowd of fools clamor for a chance to ride a merry-go-round powered only by wind. Playing cards were designed featuring verses and satirical illustrations of figures before and after their ruin, poking particular fun at Welsh and Irish investors and depicting women investors as henpecking their husbands for control over their money, or else suffering abandonment by former suitors after their ruin.

Of great international popularity was a large Dutch volume, Het Groote Tafereel der Dwaasheid [The Great Picture (or Scene) of Folly, also known in English as The Great Mirror of Folly], published in Amsterdam at the end of 1720. In the Netherlands, where the French coffeehouse on Amsterdam’s Kalverstraat served as an exchange for stock in English firms, investors had breathlessly bought shares in the South Sea Company as well as in illusory Dutch and English firms which came to be called windhandel, or 'businesses built on air'. The publication of Het Groote Tafereel der Dwaasheid testifies to the great shock and impact of the international crash; the massive book assembled poems, farcical plays, maps, playing cards and more than 70 prints. The volume framed the investment craze as an echo of the previous century’s Tulipmania, and modeled it as a kind of epidemic, spreading between countries and causing in each a terrifying frenzy of gambling, corruption and immorality. The book and a number of its excerpted prints circulated widely in Europe and England, some of the prints with their captions translated from the Dutch.

It was in this climate that Chinese export porcelain plates of the present type appeared, although neither a graphic source or an explicit interpretation for their decoration has yet come to light. Each centers a dancing actor of the commedia dell’arte who has traditionally been identified as Harlequin, although David Howard and John Ayers contend that one plate may depict Scaramouche and that three others may not represent either figure (see D. Howard and J. Ayers, China for the West, London, 1978, vol. I, pp. 234-235, pl. 230 and figs. 230a and 230b). The plates appear to have been produced solely for the Dutch market, as only examples with Dutch captions have been recorded. Despite its narrow market, however, the type appears to have held substantial commercial appeal, as many individual plates and incomplete sets are known to exist. Perhaps consumers found appeal in their satirical bite—each plate presents a scene in which a brash stock-hawking promoter has been replaced by a capering clown—or perhaps, as Howard and Ayers argue, Dutch porcelain vendors feared another destabilizing speculation craze and intended to promote a more sobering and cautionary moral.

The series is sometimes described as 'The Great Scene of Folly’, a direct reference to Het Groote Tafereel der Dwaasheid. At least two versions of its type are known to exist, one represented by the present lot and the other depicting figures in the same six poses but without captions, and in costumes and settings closer to a domestic Chinese style. Similar works in Delft earthenware are also known, some also framing their central figures with captions relating to the 1720 bubble. Examples of these variant types are illustrated in C. Le Corbeiller, China Trade Porcelain: Patterns of Exchange, New York, 1974, pp. 43, figs. 16 and 17, in contrast to a plate of the present type, p. 42, no. 18. Also compare the satirical set of Dutch-decorated Chinese export porcelain plates, one of which depicts Harlequin, lot 110 in the present sale.

Although complete sets of six ‘South Sea Bubble’ plates are scarce, the group of six presented as lot 157 in the current Ann and Gordon Getty Collection auction series, which were previously in the collection of François Hervouët, is one of several sets known to exist. A series of six 'Bubble' plates from the Mottahedeh collection was sold at Sotheby’s, New York, 30 January 1985, lot 140 (three of these plates comprise lot 158 in the present sales). Other complete sets were sold at Christie's, Amsterdam, 23 October 1986, lots 130-135; Christie's, Amsterdam, 15 October 1990, lot 142; Christie's, London, 7 April 1997, lot 89; and the Dr. Anton C.R. Dreesmann sale, Christie's, Amsterdam, 16 April 2002, lot 1308. A set of six of the second, captionless, type was sold at Christie's, New York, 21 January 2009, lot 82; and a set of five was sold at the Collection of Benjamin F. Edwards III sale, Christie's, New York, 26 January 2010, lot 19. A group of three further plates (lot 398) and three pairs of plates (lots 396, 397 and 399), are offered in the online component of the present Ann and Gordon Getty Collection sales.